Crime-writing winner can't put down the pen

By Jason Steger

Kerry Greenwood has an addiction – to writing. She has had it since she was 16 and wrote her first novel, <i>Magic Stone</i>. She still has that manuscript, but "no one will ever see it".

Nevertheless, she has enthusiastically indulged that addiction, publishing 60 books, and has a new novel, the 20th to feature her popular jazz-era heroine, Phryne Fisher, due out next month.

Author Kerry Greenwood in her study.Credit:Justin McManus

So it was perhaps not surprising that when Sisters in Crime, the group that champions crime writing by Australian women, decided to introduce a lifetime achievement gong to its annual Davitt Awards, which were presented on Saturday, it should give the inaugural one to Greenwood. She also won the readers' choice award for <i>Taman Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery</i>.

Other awards went to Maggie Groff <i>Mad Men</i>, <i>Bad Girls</i> and the <i>Guerilla Knitters Institute</i> for best fiction, Pamela Burton <i>The Waterlow Killings</i> for true crime and Jennifer Walsh <i>The Tunnels of Tarcoola</i> for young-adult fiction.

Greenwood said like any addiction, she got a buzz from writing. "Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point – usually between chapter seven and nine – then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill. Friends have described heroin to me, and this is really like a rush. Also it's legal."

She reckons that each Phryne Fisher novel takes 43 days to write, but she does a couple of months of research and pottering around first. She says she has a great reservoir of stories that she doesn't expect to be able to write in her lifetime.

It's a big few weeks for Greenwood. On Friday <i>Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries</i> returns to the small screen on the ABC – "I love it, I get lots of new readers" – an exhibition of the costumes from the series opens at Rippon Lea the following day, and a few weeks later comes the new Phryne Fisher novel, <i>Murder and Mendelssohn</i>.

She published her first Phryne Fisher novel, <i>Cocaine Blues</i>, in 1989. "I remember talking to John Mortimer and he said he was relying on Rumpole to keep him in his old age; well I'm doing the same with Phryne – she's my mainstay."